Good Disney World itinerary design minimizes waits and walking while fitting in to the idea that people are at Disney World on a vacation, not as part of their through-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

Up until the era of FastPass+, itineraries that minimized waits required both backtracking (to get, and then use, legacy FASTPASSES) and early mornings.

In fact, the scarce resource before FastPass+ was early mornings. Because most people don’t want to get up early—or can’t get their preschoolers/ teens/ husbands up early—the parks are always relatively uncrowded at open. So the way to minimize waits was to arrive well before open, and at open hit rides that would build lines quickly; you’d then start grabbing legacy FASTPASSES for later and do lower wait rides in between FASTPASS return times.

Under FastPass+ this still works fine—at least so far. You can hit a park early, and do (depending on the park) at least two and perhaps as many as four rides in the first hour that later in the day will take hours of waiting. Your FASTPASS+ you’d use later in the morning and early in the afternoon.

But under FastPass+, if you have enough park days, you can skip a whole lot of mornings.

Unless you are on a short trip, what’s scarce under FastPass+ is not mornings, but rather park days, as each added park day gives you three more FastPass+ to pre-book. With park days after the first four going for about $10.65 per day per person, this is a pretty good deal. Because, remember, the reason the parks are least crowded at open is that PEOPLE WANT TO SLEEP IN.

FastPass+ lets itineraries be designed that let people sleep in.

For example, here’s my old Autumn-Winter-Spring, pre-FastPass+ itinerary:

Note the seven ticket days, need for a hopper, two mornings off, five early mornings, and two particularly long days–Sunday and Monday.

Above is my FastPass+ based itinerary for similar weeks. Nine ticket days, but no hopper–so it’s actually less expensive.

It has four mornings off–twice as many–and no comparably long days. Moreover, breaking Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios into two half-days each makes seeing the shows at those parks easier, and limits the walking and backtracking at them each day.

Here’s a shorter variant. Losing a day but keeping the same amount of park time loses a couple of mornings and adds a longer day at Animal Kingdom–a better option, when workable, than doing Hollywood Studios in a day, as getting to HS before open and staying through Fantasmic can make for a long day.

FastPass+ lets you arrive late and then hit typically high wait rides with hardly any delay at times when under the old system you’d either be waiting a while or looking at very late return times. At the cost of extra ticket days, you get more mornings off!

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June 4, 2014 3 Comments

Itineraries Now All Updated to FastPass+

by Dave

I completed last week a process that began in November 2013: updating the Disney World itineraries on this site for FastPass+.

There’s three parts to the itineraries on this site (links are to examples):

A summary that indicates which park to be in which day, and includes dining
To-Do Lists that among other steps indicate how many ticket days and hotel nights to buy, and how and which dining and FastPass+ to reserve for when
Daily agendas that give step by step approaches to each day’s activities

Because dining is reservable 180 days ahead, the first itineraries intended for use launched this week–which meant I had to have summaries done 180 days ahead (hence the November start), FastPass+ done 60 days ahead, and daily agendas done–well, before the end of May, hence the flurry the last few weeks (sorry about those RSS feeds…).

In the meantime, I’ve been running two sets of itineraries–at peak, 24 of them–so that people who had booked dining for January through May could use the old ones, while those aimed at June and later could use the new ones.

That’s done now, as everything (well, everything I could find) now redirects to the new itineraries. (All the new itineraries have “FastPass+” in the name.)

There’s still three core itineraries and nine variants (all shorter but one):

The Basic Itinerary, which covers my three top-ranked December weeks
The High-Crowd Itinerary, which covers the busier times of the year and replaces the old “Summer” itinerary
The Lower-Crowd Itinerary, which covers the rest of the year, and replaces the old “Autumn-Winter-Spring” itinerary

Which weeks they work–and any necessary changes in them those weeks–is covered here.

All the shorter variants are here.

I’ll be posting a little later on the design principles behind these, but the key is that they are designed from the blank page on to take advantage of using FastPass+ to match how most families wish to visit–that is, they include a lot of sleeping in.

Of necessity there’s less “sleeping in” in the high crowd variant than the other two, and less in the shorter variants than in the longer ones–but in all cases there’s more than in the old itineraries!

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June 3, 2014 No Comments

The WDW Magazine Summer Issue is Out

by Dave

This month’s WDW Magazine has hit the stands. Available on iTunes, for Android, and on the web, the issue focuses on Disney World in the summer–special summer offerings and summer coping strategies.

My article for first timers gives some options on how to run your days.

The usual advice to arrive early and take afternoons off is perfectly sound. But the whole reason it works is that most people don’t want to arrive early.

My article notes how FastPass+ makes later arrivals much more practical.

I’ve been at Disney World a million times in the summer–most recently both last August and last September, and with more Disney World summer coming up soon later in June.

I will never forget one August trip tent camping at Fort Wilderness. You don’t want to tent camp in the summer heat…but I was lucky enough to have pouring rain every day–destroying all my shoes within the first three days of the trip.

That was when I turned to Mickey Crocs as my basic Disney World footwear–impermeable to water, and cooling in the heat!